FullReads

Dundas was looking up with a slow, deferential, decorous smile that nevertheless lightened and transfigured his expression. It seemed somehow communicated to Millicent’s face as she looked down at him from beneath her white eyelids and long, thick, dark lashes, for she was standing beside him, handing him the plate of bread. Then, still smiling, she passed noiselessly on to the others.

Emory was indeed clumsy, for he had stretched his hand downward to offer a morsel to a friend of his under the table–he was on terms of exceeding amity with the four-footed members of the household–and in his absorption not withdrawing it as swiftly as one accustomed to canine manners should do, he had his frosted finger well mumbled before he could, as it were, repossess himself of it.

“I wonder what they charge fur iron over yander at the settlemint, Em’ry?” observed Sim Roxby presently.

“Dun’no’, sir,” responded Emory, glumly, his sullen black eyes full of smouldering fire–“hevin’ no call ter know, ez I ain’t no blacksmith.”

“I war jes’ wonderin’ ef tenpenny nails didn’t cost toler’ble high ez reg’lar feed,” observed Roxby, gravely.

But his mother laughed out with a gleeful cracked treble, always a ready sequence of her son’s rustic sallies. “He got ye that time, Em’ry,” she cried.

A forced smile crossed Emory’s face. He tossed back his tangled dark hair with a gasp that was like the snort of an unruly horse submitting to the inevitable, but with restive projects in his brain. “I let the dog hyar ketch my finger whilst feedin’ him,” he said. His plausible excuse for the ten-penny expression was complete; but he added, his darker mood recurring instantly, “An’, Mis’ Roxby, I hev put a stop ter them ez hev tuk ter callin’ me Em’ly, I hev.”

The old woman looked up, her small wrinkled mouth round and amazed. “I never called ye Emily,” she declared.

Swift repentance seized him.

“Naw, ‘m,” he said, with hurried propitiation. “I ‘lowed ye did.”

“I didn’t,” said the old woman. “But ef I warter find it toothsome ter call ye ‘Emily,’ I dun’no’ how ye air goin’ ter pervent it. Ye can’t go gun-nin’ fur me, like ye done fur the men at the mill, fur callin’ ye ‘Emily.'”

“Law, Mis’ Roxby!” he could only exclaim, in his horror and contrition at this picture he had thus conjured up. “Ye air welcome ter call me ennything ye air a mind ter,” he protested.

And then he gasped once more. The eyes of the guest, contemptuous, amused, seeing through him, were fixed upon him. And he himself had furnished the lily-handed stranger with the information that he had been stigmatized “Em’ly” in the banter of his associates, until he had taken up arms, as it were, to repress this derision.

“It takes powerful little ter put ye down, Em’ry,” said Roxby, with rallying laughter. “Mam hev sent ye skedaddlin’ in no time at all. I don’t b’lieve the Lord made woman out’n the man’s rib. He made her out’n the man’s backbone; fur the man ain’t hed none ter speak of sence.”

Millicent, with a low gurgle of laughter, sat down beside Emory at the table, and fixed her eyes, softly lighted with mirth, upon him. The others too had laughed, the stranger with a flattering intonation, but young Keenan looked at her with a dumb appealing humility that did not altogether fail of its effect, for she busied herself to help his plate with an air of proprietorship as if he were a child, and returned it with a smile very radiant and sufficient at close range. She then addressed herself to her own meal. The young dogs under the table ceased to beg, and gambolled and gnawed and tugged at her stout little shoes, the sound of their callow mirthful growls rising occasionally above the talk. Sometimes she rose again to wait on the table, when they came leaping out after her, jumping and catching at her skirts, now and then casting themselves on the ground prone before her feet, and rolling over and over in the sheer joy of existence.